Film Review — IF
John Krasinski overdoes the heartstring tugs, but this is still a modestly enjoyable family film
Rather bizarrely, the film John Krasinski’s IF most reminded me of was The Sixth Sense (1999), but with imaginary friends instead of ghosts. Just as Haley Joel Osment gradually comes to terms with his ability to help these often angry and traumatised departed spirits, so Cailey Fleming’s Bea learns to help the generally cuddly and loveable imaginary friends that now exist in a kind of limbo retirement home on Coney Island. The children who thought them up are now adults that no longer see them; a variant on themes in Monsters Inc (2001), Toy Story 3 (2010), and Inside Out (2015). It’s a cute premise, and one I went along with quite happily for much of the film, but it isn’t on a par with the above Pixar masterpieces, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.
Not to be confused with Lindsay Anderson’s anti-establishment satirical classic If…. (1968), IF concerns the aforementioned adolescent Bea, whose mother has died and whose father (Krasinski) is now in the same New York hospital where she passed away, awaiting heart surgery. He tells Bea he has a “broken heart”, spelling out the subtle-as-a-sledgehammer metaphor for all of us dimwits in the dark. It’s probably more to do with high cholesterol, but much of this part of the plot…
